


no matter how far away you roam

by tommyandthejons



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Drinking, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21740326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tommyandthejons/pseuds/tommyandthejons
Summary: When it looks like Favs won't be able to make it home for Christmas, Tommy and Lovett bring the holiday spirit(s) to him.
Relationships: Jon Favreau/Jon Lovett/Tommy Vietor
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29
Collections: Crooked Secret Santa 2019





	no matter how far away you roam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thetimesinbetween](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetimesinbetween/gifts).

> Dear thetimesinbetween, I hope you don't mind, I tried to stay true to the core of your prompt, but went at it in a slightly different direction. I hope you like the result!
> 
> Thanks so much to both of my betas for making this story so much better than it was when it started.

Favs is debating whether he wants to call home or not— he already texted his mom to let her know they’ve been delayed on the trip, but he should probably actually speak to her and he finally has the time for a call— when there’s a knock on the door Favs isn’t expecting. Housekeeping had already been by because his bed’s been made. He supposes they could have gotten confused and come again except it’s far too late in the evening for them to be coming around. It can’t be room service because he hadn’t gotten around to ordering anything yet. If he waits too much longer, he’ll miss his chance and have to go down to the bar. He doesn’t really want to do that, though— too much of a chance of running into someone he knows and he isn’t up to pretending to be an adult about not getting to go home for the holidays. He’d rather pout by himself in his room. It could be work, he supposes, but there’s no way the President’s already finished reviewing his most recent draft of the State of the Union, not yet anyway, and if he’d called Jon, there’s no way Jon would have missed the call. Not after the last time— the only time, hopefully— that happened. He’d changed all of his phone settings after that, not wanting to chance a repeat performance. Favs checks his blackberry just to confirm he hadn’t missed anything, then pads towards the door and shouts, “Coming,” as he wrestles his shirt into place. He looks through the peephole to see Tommy, who’s supposed to be down at some local bar with Rhodes and the rest of the crew, clutching a brown paper bag in his arms.

“Hey, man,” he says as he opens the door, but Tommy doesn’t give him a chance to get any further, muscling past him into the room, putting the bag down on the only free space on the dresser— the rest of the space is taken up by drafts of speeches, briefing books, and yellow legal pads he really needs to make sure to pack away— with a telling clunk.

“I thought you had plans? I’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. He did, kind of, that wasn’t a total lie. Okay, sure, they were stuck in Copenhagen because of unexpected snow, and there weren’t any more public events planned. The schedulers— with Alyssa riding herd on them— were trying to make sure they would be ready to get out of there as soon as possible, which meant that as long as it looked like there was a chance they’d get out, there were unlikely to be any public events planned either. So the president was spending most of his “free” time in impromptu meetings with various world leaders who had been at the Climate Change Conference and were therefore also stuck in Copenhagen. Theoretically that leaves Favs with nothing to do, but it is December and the State of the Union is bearing down on him like… well, he’s sure Lovett would have half a dozen similes. The SOTU was the speech of all speeches, and from draft to draft he went back and forth between feeling as though he was finally living up to all the potential everyone ever told him he had and dying of imposter syndrome.

“Yeah, you said,” Tommy agrees, but it doesn’t stop him from pulling several bottles of wine from the bag. Favs watches as he lines them up, carefully, needlessly precise.

“Wine? Really?” Favs complains, feeling a bit hypocritical for complaining even as he’s trying to convince Tommy to leave. Really, Tommy should be out having fun with the rest of the team. He deserves a chance to cut loose— Favs knows how hard he works. Favs should probably be out with them too, taking advantage of the opportunity to see as much of Copenhagen as they could in the snow. The little he’d seen traveling from the hotel to the conference looked like something out of a fairy tale with all the little shops and the people and the lights. He couldn’t think of anywhere better to be right before Christmas except, obviously, for home.

“You’re not the one who’s going to be facing my mom without anything for Christmas,” Tommy says and Favs knows he’s joking.

“I wouldn’t want Jeanne to be mad at me,” Favs says in a voice as though he’s joking even though he secretly means it. He doesn’t want her to be mad at him. He likes that Jeanne likes him, treats him like he’s one of the family. It’s normal to want your friend’s parents to like you, he thinks, feeling oddly defensive about something no one is arguing with him about.

“Knock, knock,” he hears from the still open door. Of course Lovett is in on this too. He should have known. Lovett drops a plastic bag full of some sort of food next to Tommy’s bottles of wine.

“Wine? Are you serious?” Lovett complains, unknowingly echoing Favs’ complaint from earlier. Favs can’t help but smile at the predictability and at how well Lovett fits with them. From when Favs had interviewed Lovett he’d known that he needed Lovett with an instinctive surety that went far beyond Lovett’s credentials on paper. Lovett balanced him out— more than balanced, Lovett challenged him, pushed him. He never stopped pushing, but somehow that only ever made Favs feel more secure.

“I didn’t hear you volunteering to get the booze!” Tommy shoots back.

“I got the food,” Lovett retorts. Tommy picks a heart shaped gingerbread cookie from the bag and makes a face to which Lovett defensively says, “They were closing up, you get what you get.”

Before they can devolve from squabbling to a full on spat, Favs grabs one of the bottles of wine and asks, “Did anyone bring a bottle opener?” If he’s going to have a night of company against his will, he’d rather it not be a night of Tommy and Lovett bickering.

“Isn’t there one in the minibar?” Tommy asks and starts opening drawers.

“I read that you can uncork it with a shoe,” Lovett volunteers. “Someone give me their shoe.”

“That sounds like a trip to the emergency room waiting to happen,” Favs says dubiously as he joins Tommy. He finds the corkscrew and tosses it to Tommy even as Lovett complains, “Don’t you trust me? Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“At home, where I’m supposed to be,” Favs says. He means it to be funny, but his disappointment at being stuck in Denmark instead of with his family in Massachusetts slips out.

“Oh come on,” Lovett says. “Does home have wine?” Yes, home has wine. Though Favs would rather a beer, all things considered, which he could also have at home. Favs rolls his eyes at Lovett.

“Does home have cookies?” he offers one of the hearts to Favs. It says _jeg elsker dig_ and has tiny icing hearts around the words. Favs has no clue what the Danish means, though the tiny hearts are a solid context clue. But even if the cookies do say what he would want them to say, he doesn't think Lovett's trying to send send him— or Tommy for that matter— messages in code through baked goods that have hearts all over them. Sometimes a cookie is just a cookie, even if Favs wishes it were something more. Favs is sure Lovett just pointed at things and let the seller make the choices. If it had— but it doesn’t. And it’s not the same as the cookies his mom makes every year— she always makes him chocolate chip ones, his favorite, even if they’re not really a Christmas cookie, along with the more traditional varieties. She’d sent him pictures of the ingredients all lined up before the weather had turned. 

“Does home have us?” Lovett asks, gesturing at himself and Tommy, and that’s something home didn’t have. It was part of the draw of home, in a way, getting away from them and the confusion they made him feel.

“No, home definitely doesn’t have you,” Favs admits and Lovett seems to accept that as a win, smirking at Favs before he grabs the wine from where Tommy’d set it on the dresser and taking a swig straight from the bottle. Favs watches the line of his throat as Tommy bumps his arm.

“We do have glasses,” Tommy says. He’s holding out two empty ones though they’re tumblers and not wine glasses. He hasn’t poured yet, probably doing that waiting for the wine to breathe bullshit because that’s exactly the sort of fancy ass bullshit Tommy would do followed by a toast once they all have their glasses. “You don’t have to drink from the bottle like an animal.”

Lovett holds up his middle finger and Favs is pretty sure he drinks more than he would have otherwise just to prove his point.

No, home definitely doesn’t have them. Either of them. Favs grabs the bottle from Lovett as soon as he lowers it with an obnoxious popping sound as he pulls his lips from the bottle. He looks at Tommy then Lovett and says, “Here’s to best friends, who don’t let you sulk alone in your room even when they should,” before taking a long swig from the bottle himself.

“Yeah, well, I was all for not bothering you after this morning,” Lovett says as Favs passes Tommy the bottle. “But Tommy insisted that he wasn’t going to let you wallow by yourself, and I wasn’t going to let him face you alone.”

“I haven’t been _that_ bad,” Favs says, but when he looks to Tommy to back him up, Tommy frowns a little. It’s silly, but Favs hates making Tommy look like that. Hates any time they’re not on the same page really.

“Look, man,” Tommy says, “Everyone understands, we’re all running on fumes. Nobody wants to be stuck here.” Tommy takes a sip from the bottle, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand

Well shit. Favs hadn’t realized he’d been so obvious. Though if he had to be obvious about missing home, he supposes there are more embarrassing things he could be obvious about, like glances that linger too long on Tommy’s arms or Lovett’s ass.

“I—” he stops and looks at them. Really looks at them, Tommy with his least judgmental face on, Lovett less readable, a little fidgety, like he isn’t sure if Favs is going to accept what he said or fight him, and he thinks _I don’t deserve them_. “Thanks guys. It means a lot.”

“Yeah, well, you’re just lucky I make it a rule never to say no to drinking with hot guys who won’t sleep with me.”

“You make it a rule to never say no to drinking when someone else is buying, you mean,” Tommy says.

Favs grabs the bottle from Tommy, skipping Lovett. “If you guys are going to be like this, I’m going to need more wine,” he says, as they start squabbling again, though he doesn’t really mean it. Their fights are more entertaining than anything else, not without heat, but generally without malice. Cody keeps making jokes about how the three of them are like an old married couple. An old married throuple? Is that a thing? Cody’s not wrong about Tommy and Lovett. Maybe, Favs finds it in himself to hope, he’s right about Favs too.

Lovett’s the first to sit, legs criss-cross on the floor, leaning back against the bed. Favs holds out for a while just because he can, because it’s funny watching Tommy hold the bottle just out of Lovett’s reach and hearing the complaints, but eventually he’s had enough wine that he lets himself sink down near Lovett, Tommy following shortly after.

They continue passing the bottle back and forth, trading stories of the past week in Copenhagen staffing the president. Tommy tells them of how, after he’d slipped on the sidewalk, he’d been so petrified at the possibility of Obama slipping on the ice in front of the cameras that he’d spent the day with pockets full of rock salt only to have a reporter question him on the white dust that filtered out through the fabric. Tommy looks pleased when Lovett laughs at that, even as he complains about his ruined pants.

Lovett’s stories are no less entertaining for the fact that Favs lived through most of them, his expert storytelling more than making up for the familiarity, drawing reluctant laughter from Favs even when he’s the villain in Lovett’s stories, forcing Lovett— under apparent wretched and authoritarian working conditions— to work before 10 am, almost making him forget how much he wishes he weren’t there.

The second bottle goes more rapidly than the first and Favs doesn’t actually remember opening the third— maybe it happened when he got up to piss. He’s pretty tipsy given that they’re only drinking wine, but he hadn’t really had anything to eat beyond Lovett’s cookies since lunch.

Lovett keeps fidgeting with one of the empties, first shredding the label from it, then, when the bottle only had strips of stubborn adhesive and paper left, he starts knocking it back and forth between his hands until Tommy reaches out and stills the bottle. Lovett’s like a perpetual motion machine and Favs knows from experience that Tommy can’t take that sort of fidgeting— Tommy used to glare at him so bad back in the Senate office and Favs would tap his foot or click his pen when he got stuck on a speech. Sometimes if he got annoyed enough, he’d reach over and pull the pen out of Favs’ hand. Sometimes he’d intentionally provoke Tommy to see what his response would be, back when he still had hope those sort of casual touches from Tommy might have meant something. 

Favs finds himself staring at Tommy’s hands on Lovett’s, the way he holds Lovett still and can’t help but consider other times Tommy might hold him still. He realizes he’s let his mouth drop open and closes it, banishing the thoughts he shouldn’t be letting himself linger on. Luckily, they’re too busy staring at each other to notice, Lovett’s eyes narrowing at Tommy. The second Tommy lets go of him, Lovett mischievously starts up again looking for all the world like he’s daring Tommy to do something.

This time Tommy snatches it and puts it firmly out of Lovett’s reach and Favs can’t help but think about Tommy taking his pen again. He doesn’t think Tommy had ever looked at him that intently when he’d taken the pen away. Regardless, it works, though Lovett keeps eyeing Tommy like he’s considering whether he can take him. Or at least it works until the third bottle is nearly empty and Lovett deliberately chooses to drain it then begins to spin it around.

“Could you knock it off with spin the bottle?” Tommy says, but after he does, his face goes weird in that way that Favs knows means he’s regretting it.

“Oh, yeah, spin the bottle with you two,” Lovett says. “Can you think of anything more pointless? Because this trip isn’t cursed enough.” Lovett looks from one of them to the other then says, provokingly, “At least that’s one way to get you to stop grabbing me, Thomas.”

Lovett deliberately spins the bottle then, his looks all but daring them to do something, anything. Favs is staring down at it, and without looking, he knows Tommy is too.

Favs holds his breath as the bottle stutters to a stop, directly between them and Lovett laughs, almost more of an exhale than a true laugh, and says, “I guess you’re off the hook,” no trace of anger left in his voice.

Favs feels a sudden conviction that he doesn’t want to be off the hook. Here he is, stuck in Denmark with two people he never wants to be without, except that he’s not _with_ them. Not how he wishes he was. “Boston rules,” he says and he can feel their attention snap to him. “Boston rules mean you have to kiss both of us.” Jon realizes after maybe he should have said that Lovett had to pick or that he had to kiss him, letting Tommy off the hook, but then he hears Tommy echo, “Yeah, Boston rules, Lovett,” backing his play.

He sees Tommy shift out of the corner of his eye, Tommy’s posture mirroring Favs’ own, his arms crossing like Favs’ are, a united front against any argument Lovett might have. He doesn’t need to look any closer to be sure Tommy understands what he’d said or why he’d said it, even if moments ago he would have never expected Tommy to be on board. 

“We’re not in Boston, we’re in Copenhagen,” Lovett points out. 

“Yeah, but we’re playing with _Boston_ rules,” Tommy says.

“We can vote on it,” Favs offers but Lovett rolls his eyes and says, “I can see how this is going to go. Fine.” And he darts forward and performatively smacks kisses on each of their cheeks in quick succession. “To think, if it weren’t snowing we could have gone to Tivoli instead of playing middle school games in Favs’ hotel room,” he says after, as Favs tries to conceal his disappointment. 

“I bet everyone’s still at the bar,” Tommy says looking at his watch. Tommy’s face is that particular sort of unexpressive that he wears when he has to do press and is trying to project calmness and neutrality, but his cheeks are still rosy, have been since Lovett kissed him. Favs is drunk enough that he decides not to think about it too closely in case he blurts out something he shouldn’t. “We could check and meet up with them instead,” Tommy continues. He and Lovett start to squabble over whether it’s worth going or not, as if it hadn’t been Lovett’s idea in the first place.

Favs isn’t really paying attention to them. He’s staring at the bottle, watching as Lovett’s hands reach out to start fidgeting with it again, and Jon beats him to it, gives it a gentle tap, just enough that it spins and points to Lovett.

“What, you didn’t get enough? One kiss and suddenly you’re playing for my team?” Lovett asks, teasing in a way that really doesn’t feel very funny to Favs. If anything Lovett sounds disappointed in him, like he doesn’t trust that Jon means it. Like he thinks Favs was making fun of him. It’s the possibility that Lovett thinks he doesn’t mean it that redoubles his commitment to his half-baked impulse as much as the wine, as much as his desire. He doesn’t want Lovett to think he would make a joke that could hurt Lovett. He suddenly wonders if, just maybe, some of the jokes Lovett had made about them in the past were an attempt at self defense. The thought makes Jon’s heart hurt. 

Anything Favs has to say feels like it would be too much for that moment, so he doesn’t say anything at all, sticks to his plan and moves towards Lovett, slowly, inexorably, giving him every opportunity to back away but he doesn’t, holds his ground, giving Favs that same challenging look that always makes him want to outperform whatever Lovett expects.

It’s not the best first kiss in the history of the world, Favs misjudges the angle, Lovett is so still at first, as if he’s waiting for Favs to admit the whole thing is a joke or maybe that he’s drunk. But Favs isn’t joking and he’s not _that_ drunk. Maybe he needs to tell Lovett that. Before he can, something inexplicably shifts, and Lovett’s kissing him back. Then he hears the sound of a throat clearing and Tommy says, “I should go.”

Except he doesn’t, and Favs knows that if Tommy really wanted to leave, he would leave. He didn’t have to draw their attention to him. Favs doesn’t want Tommy to leave either, not unless he wants to, and it doesn’t seem like he does.

“Think Lovett owes you a kiss too,” he says to Tommy, after he and Lovett pull apart. “Boston rules, you know.”

Lovett looks like he’s about to argue until Tommy nods in agreement then half turns to Lovett, and asks, “Boston rules?” as if he’s not sure that Lovett will want him, as if either of them would ever turn Tommy down. 

“Do your worst,” Lovett challenges and Favs watches as all of Tommy’s focus shifts to Lovett, as he tugs Lovett towards him, as Lovett lets him. He watches them kiss and instead of feeling jealous or left out or any of the feelings he might have expected, he can’t help but think how good they look together, Lovett practically in Tommy’s lap. He can’t help but think that if he’d made it home for Christmas, he might not have gotten _this_.

In that moment, overcome with his feelings for them, Favs doesn’t mind if the weather keeps them in Copenhagen until January, as long as they’re there together. It’s cliche and the two of them would make so much fun of him if he were to say it out loud, but he can’t help but think if home is where the heart is, then he’s already there.


End file.
